


Bats, Bats and Batarangs

by thismighthurt



Category: Batman and Robin (Comics), Gotham Academy (Comics)
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Gen, Zombies, friendship-ish?, ultimate power team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-16
Updated: 2015-06-16
Packaged: 2018-04-04 16:42:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4145064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thismighthurt/pseuds/thismighthurt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Damian, are you Batman?” wasn’t too far off, and Maps Mizoguchi realizes this when Robin swoops in to save Gotham Academy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bats, Bats and Batarangs

**Author's Note:**

> Hiiiii, everyone! This is my first fic for this fandom, and on AO3 in general. It's just a thingie. I don't even know how to describe it. I guess its Damian being cute? And Maps being cute? The ultimate power team being cute together?
> 
> Just... enjoy.

Maps swung her bat, and with a wet crunch the zombie’s head broke like a piñata.

She screamed. Oh god, this was terrifying. It was terrifying to have a horde of zombies encroaching on her, pressing her ever closer against the wall so it was like she couldn’t breathe, clawing at her eyes and uniform. It was terrifying to see her school overrun by them; to see more and more climbing out of graves in the old cemetery and—

Crack! She caught another one by the shoulder and screamed again. She broke the next one’s rib cage into several chunks—more screaming. One more time, though this time finally like a battle cry, she yelled and brought the bat straight down on brittle, bony head.

Okay, this was terrifying, but this was also overwhelmingly cool. Maps Mizoguchi, zombie slayer! She could do this, she thought, panting. With a heavy breath she punted away a disjointed hand that was freakishly grasping at her sock. She could fight her way out, find Olive, find Kyle, find Pom and Colton and Heathcliff and _was that a cape_? No matter—she and her trusty baseball bat could hack their way outta this hellish crowd and into the Gotham City sunset… After she’d picked up all the loot zombies could drop of course. Looting was important. So was getting to the bottom of why these poor souls had attempted to join the living in the first place, but—Maps hit a tall, wobbly zombie like she would a home run—she figured she could worry about that when she wasn’t surrounded by a good ten of them.

That was when the bricks behind her flew outward in a cacophony of small explosions. _Fireworks_? Maps wondered bemusedly. Though they took down a few of the undead, the bricks got Maps too, sending her reeling right into the outstretched arms of the nearest corpse, a lady who caught her almost gently. Maps was so deafened and dizzy that she would have folded into the almost-hug if not for the god awful stench and, of course, the rotting spindly fingers that were beginning to dig sharply into her shoulders.

Where… Oh no… Where was her bat?! Bat, bat, oh baseball bat! _Accio_ , bat! _Fly to me through the smoke, my trusty bat!_

It didn’t, and Maps could see the zombie lady salivating through the haze. She winced away. If only Maps could reach into her pocket…

The zombie directly to Maps’ left dropped suddenly. Two zombies on her right staggered then fell, and then Robin the Boy Wonder was bearing down on the lady zombie like a vicious bird of prey, escrimas bared.

 _I prayed for my bat_ , Maps thought with wide, watery eyes as her captor crumpled. She hit the ground too, but didn’t really mind a few new scrapes on her knees.

Robin’s cape billowed above her.

_I prayed for my bat, and I got Robin. To whoever’s up there listening—THANK YOU!_

“Let’s go,” Robin huffed. “Come, we have to—“

Maps yelped as the remainder of the wall behind her burst outward. Gotham Academy seriously had to do something about the quality of their bricking. It seems just about anything could get though the walls, even… Maps’ jaw went slack. This hulkingly large, muscular zombie must have been a total beefcake in another life. How he was still packing this much muscle as a zombie, Maps had no idea.

“Snap out of it! Get up!”

The zombie beefcake began a charge.

“Maps, move!” Robin yelled, bodily pulling her up and dragging her along by the wrist. Maps followed, heart pounding and hair as wild as her eyes. Behind her, the zombie was yelling and frothing out the mouth, plowing down the skinnier zombies and making the earth shake in his mad dash toward Maps and Robin.

“Jump with me!”

Maps head snapped back forward in time to see a quickly approaching raised flower bed. She leapt, and ended pulling Robin along as they landed, so desperate was she to escape. She switched up Robin’s hold on her to take his hand instead, beginning to floor it after glancing over her shoulder and seeing large fingers grasping at the air behind her. _Not good not good not good not good._

“Don’t pan—“

The giant zombie looked even bigger than he did before. It was now easily apparent that he couldn’t have possibly been this big in real life. _Mutated zombie,_ Maps realized, _Enhanced zombie!_ She realized, as the thing raised his rippling arms over his head, brandishing the raised concrete flowerbed he’d ripped out of the ground.

“He pulled up the—“

“I know what he did! Hey!”

Maps had slowed, digging furiously and spastically into her pockets. _Please, please don’t tell me it fell out!_ Meanwhile, the mutant shook the flowerbed in the air. He began to wind up for a large toss.

Robin dropped a zombie with an escrima as they ran. “Don’t slow down!” He was reaching for her.

“Ah-hah!” Maps finally cried. She spun around and with all the might imaginable for the great Maps Mizoguchi, zombie slayer, snapped her elbow and wrist like a pro pitcher and—

“No!” she yelped as Robin grabbed her roughly around the waist. She could only watch the batarang spin off course. “NoooooooooooooAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!”

Her pitch rose several octaves as she was yanked off her feet. “Don’t let go!” Robin yelled, clutching her tight to his body. Maps didn’t dare. She clung to him with what Robin found as surprising force, which turned even more crushing as Maps elatedly realized that the batarang had still found the giant mutant zombie’s shoulder and had caused him to drop the flowerbed on himself.

“Better than I expected!” Maps whooped, and titled her face up into the clear, chilly Gotham wind. “Awww, yeah!”

Running, fighting zombies, flying through the campus—Could she just _be_ Robin? Could she trade her tie and skirt for some kickass leggings and a bulletproof tunic? She could keep her shoes, because those were yellow, and she’d generally want more yellow in the costume. Was it possible that she could ask Batman the next time she saw him? Olive wouldn’t be thrilled about this, though. Would she understand that this was all just so exciting?

Then, Maps had to squint. The sunset was sinking into its last hurrah, a dazzling red and orange that did fantastic things to the old splendor of the school’s architecture. Maps gasped. She was doing it! She was riding off into the Gotham sunset!

Her grip on Robin slowly turned into a full on hug, as a sort of thank you for having a grappling hook and saving her from zombies and swinging her around campus like this.

“Quit squirming!” Damian cried, just as his feet broke the window and two of them tumbled one over the other into one of the West Hall’s music rooms. Damian broke Maps’ fall, but crashed violently into a quartet of music stands himself.

Wait—Damian?

A moment of dizziness again—then Maps shook the glass out of her hair and absently replaced the clip she always wore. Arms, legs, hands, feet, most of the skin on her knees: accounted for. Uniform: a little tattered and stinky, but still covering her where it mattered. She was just down one baseball bat and one overtly precious batarang. Her companion?

She observed Robin untangle himself from the stands and stretch and groan, and something clicked in her head. She knew.

“I said, are you alright?”

“Oh! Me?” Maps stammered stupidly. _No, he was asking that cello, genius._ “Yes! I’m fine, thank you.”

“I have to get going,” Robin said gruffly, brushing himself off. He stopped suddenly, though, and gave the room a once over. “Do you have anything to defend yourself with?”

Maps picked up a clarinet. Robin raised an eyebrow and said, “Maybe try a trombone slider, or one of the harder carry cases if it isn’t too hard for you to wield.”

“Noted!” Maps replied at attention, giving Robin a snappy salute. He gave off that “tt!” sound that Maps had thought about more than once. Her brain was working at a million miles an hour. So many things suddenly made _sense_.

“Wait,” she said, as Robin stood poised at the window. Robin turned around with a raised eyebrow.

“You, uh, probably knew the kid who gave me the batarang, I mean, since you have a bunch just like it, and they come from you and Batman in the first place…” she trailed off, watching Robin watch her with both his eyebrows now lifted. “I mean, tell him ‘thank you’ for me, please? He said it might come in handy some time, and he was right!” Maps grinned.

When Robin turned slightly to hide a small smile, Maps had to wrap her arms all around herself to stop from yelling, “I KNEW IT!”

The next thing she knew, though, Robin was inches from her, holding out another pristine, gleaming batarang. “I hope you won’t have to use it, but take it just in case—at least to replace the one you used.”

“Yessssss,” Maps hissed in victory. She kept her eyes trained on the whites of Robin’s mask, though, even as she fumbled to take the batarang from him without looking. Her fingers scrabbled over his gloves, then the sharp edges—

“What are you doing?” Robin hissed, thoroughly exasperated. He grabbed at one of her hands and closed it safely around the batarang. Maps allowed herself a few blinks; it was staring to look like Robin was blushing with the way her vision was starting to go all stinging and unfocused.

“Sorry. Just didn’t want you to disappear on me again.”

Robin froze, gloved hand still closed around Maps’. “Again?”

“You know, back there, you called me ‘Maps’,” she teased, grinning even wider at Robin’s efforts to mask his emotions.

“Well, that was what the file said. Am I wrong, Miss Mizoguchi?”

Maps couldn’t help it—she laughed at how ridiculous Damian Wayne was being. “No, you’re not.”

Robin sighed a long, loud, long-suffering one. He stepped over the debris and braced himself against the window. “For what it’s worth, I think we make a good team.”

Maps eyes widened tenfold and her mouth opened to suck in a long, exaggerated gasp, but she still missed it. Robin was suddenly gone, and once again she was left with just a batarang in her hands.

Still, she grinned. Maps Mizoguchi, zombie slayer, and Damian Wayne, Robin, could work batarangs pretty well between the two of them. Ultimate power team!

**Author's Note:**

> ktrnzlg.tumblr.com


End file.
